Killarney Film Studios

Killarney Film Studios was established in Johannesburg in 1915 as "the first motion picture studio in Africa".

The studio was founded and funded in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney by US citizen Isidore W. Schlesinger (d. 1949).

Two years earlier Schlesinger had bought up Australian Rufus Naylor's Africa's Amalgamated Theatres (est. 1911) and Edgar Hyman's Empire Theatres Company (est. 1912) to form the African Theatres and Films Trusts on 10 April 1913. In this way Schlesinger obtained a monopoly over film importation and distribution throughout Southern Africa.

Schlesinger set up African Film Productions (AFP), which on 5 May 1913 screened the first of its weekly newsreels, African Mirror. AFP continued to produce African Mirror, which included features on African countries such as Tanzania, and interviews with notables such as Chris Barnard for South African consumption until 1984. Schlesinger imported Joseph Albrecht from Britain to run the African Mirror.

In 1915 the Killarney Film Studios produced South Africa's first animated film, Artist's Dream. The artist was portrayed by Dennis Santry and the director was Harold Shaw. Schlesinger's wife, Mabel May, starred as the artist's dream girl. Whether this production was inspired by Thomas Edison's 1900 film of the same title is unclear, as no copies remain of the South African version. Five more animated short films followed, and film titles were also often animated.

African Film Productions made 43 films between 1916 and 1922. The scarcity of international films during the First World War boosted the development of Schlesinger's company. As befits the political context of a newly unified state (the Union of South Africa, 1910) the earlier films aimed at the white market featured co-operation between Boer and Briton as a common theme. Once apartheid started in earnest after 1948, some films took up the theme of whites standing together against black Africans. Apart from feature films, AFP produced "documentaries" for the state, as well as industrial safety films. During the 1920s to 1940s the distribution of AFP films to the black African market was aided by missionaries such as Reverend Ray Phillips, who from about 1920 wanted to use the medium to impart (Western) morals to black Africans. Phillips showed films to mine workers (most notably, during the 1922 white miners' strike), as well as to the middle class black elite who attended his Bantu Men's Social Centre (established by Phillips in Johannesburg). Most of these films came from Schlesinger's company.

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